


Coming Back From the Dead is a Hard Habit to Break

by seekingsquake



Category: The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types, The Incredible Hulk - All Media Types
Genre: Accidental Death, Angst, Bruce Banner Has Issues, Bruce Banner Needs a Hug, Character Death, Gen, Murder, Panic Attacks, Suicide, but everyone is still alive, over and over and over again, this is not a happy fic okay?, trigger warning-child abuse, trigger warning-domestic violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-18
Updated: 2014-11-18
Packaged: 2018-02-26 03:04:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,772
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2635628
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/seekingsquake/pseuds/seekingsquake
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tony thinks Bruce is impervious to death.<br/>Tony doesn't know what he's talking about.</p><p>Four times Bruce Banner died but didn't stay down.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Coming Back From the Dead is a Hard Habit to Break

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Werevampiwolf](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Werevampiwolf/gifts).



> Started as a gift for Werevampiwolf weeks ago when they were down. Finished as something to help me expel some of my own negative headspace. Is now not going to cheer anyone up, as I had initially hoped. Oh well, you can't win them all.
> 
> I am not affiliated with Marvel and don't own anything except a Hulk Pez dispenser that won't give me my candy back.  
> Please do not repost or reupload this piece anywhere without consent. If you ask, I'm sure we can work something out :]

Tony thinks a lot about how lucky he is that pretty much all his friends are unusually resilient to death. He’d never really had friends before, grew up with only Obie on his side, picked up Rhodey as a punk bitch kid at MIT, snagged Pep because Obie figured he couldn’t actually take care of himself without a babysitter. And where Tony thought he had three, he only ever had two. But it was okay, because the less people were in your inner circle, the less of a chance there was for betrayal. Tony figured two was a pretty good number.

And his two are, well, pretty resilient. Rhodey has a suit of flying armour and the common sense to stay out of trouble unless he’s following Tony, and Pep was always the queen of quick thinking and best decisions but now she’s got Extremis to back her up.

But there’s more than two now. Now there’s, there’s seven and it scares Tony more than anything because wow, _seven_. To go from two to seven in a series of months is unprecedented and terrifying, but. He figures that in his line of work, there are worse people to become attached to.

I mean, okay, headcount. Steve was frozen in the ice for seventy years and was perfectly fine once he was thawed. Thor has lived for thousands of years, and since nothing on Earth is strong enough to take him out, he will probably manage a few thousand more. Clint and Natasha are both very human, but exceptionally skilled, deadly, ruthless, and lucky enough to get themselves out of situations that they shouldn’t even be walking away from, without much more than bruises and scratches. And Bruce. Bruce, who housed a hulk in his body that was invincible. Bruce, who was not only resilient to death, but actually impervious.

In a world where Tony is forced into being friends with people who face danger on a regular basis, he figures that the people he got saddled with couldn’t be much better.

When Tony brings this up over team dinner one night after a battle that was full of close calls, everyone else kind of nod and grin, because it’s true, isn’t it? And Tony fits right in with them because for all the times he should have died he never did, at least not long enough to really count, and it feels like they’re all going to have each other for the rest of their lives.

Except Bruce.

Bruce does not nod or grin or even look up from his macaroni. He keeps his eyes down, his shoulders tight, and shovels forkful after forkful of pasta into his mouth. At first, Tony lets it pass because Bruce is always quiet and self contained, and even more so after a transformation. But after two more helpings and not a single word, he knows that something’s wrong. He doesn’t really want to draw any unwanted attention to his Science Bro, but Tony has never been very tactful, has never been one to beat around the bush, so he just pushes his plate a little away from himself and says, “Bruce?”

For the first time in nearly an hour, Bruce looks up. He doesn’t say anything and doesn’t make eye contact with anyone, but he looks up from his bowl. Everyone else has gone quiet, watching the physicist with skillfully concealed concern. Bruce crumples his napkin in his hands, then pulls out the wrinkles with dexterous fingers. His lips are twisted into an expression that is somewhere between hard discontent and pursed discomfort. He crumples the napkin again.

“Bruce, what’s goin’ on in that big head of yours?” Tony tries again, because he knows everyone else wants to but that nobody but him will. He’s closer to Bruce than any of the others. They all like the small doctor, but he’s an enigma even to those on the team that have been trained to unravel enigmas. He’s secretive and elusive and he doesn’t trust anyone. Not even Tony, not yet, but Tony knows that they’re both trying to get there. He knows that it’s not that Bruce doesn’t want to, but that it’s because Bruce was forced to learn early on that nobody could be trusted. And that, Tony knows that’s hard to break.

Bruce still doesn’t look at anyone, but he lets himself speak now. His voice is low and quiet, but his tone is hard, factual, and it carries across the table to everyone. He says, “It’s not that I can’t die. It’s that I don’t stay dead.” And before anyone can do or say anything, Bruce is up from the table and back farther into the kitchen, wrapping his dinner bowl in saran wrap and putting it in the fridge for tomorrow. He leaves the room without a word, tension visibly thrumming through his body.

The silence in the room is suffocating, but somehow not as heavy now that Bruce is gone. Somehow, the only heaviness over the team comes and goes, always, as Bruce does, like Bruce took the weight of everyone else and swallowed it, like he’s keeping them safe from it but it leaks out whenever he’s had a hard day. And Tony, he’s noticed that Bruce has more hard days than anyone likes to admit. But the silence persists, beats them all down until Thor speaks up, subdued but still not really quiet.

“What did he mean by that?”

* * *

He’s saying, Turn it around, and he’s saying, Drop me from here.

He’s saying, I’ll do it, and, We did this. All of us, and, Let me stop this.

He’s leaning over the side of a helicopter and she’s holding tight onto his arm. She’s only saying his name, but she’s begging him in her own way, don’t do this, don’t go, stay, stay. And he kisses her, long and hard and vicious. He makes sure he memorizes the texture of her hair between his fingers, the taste of her lip gloss, the way her fingers clutch at his shirt and dig into his arm as if she could hope to contain him. He’s praying, let me go, and suddenly she does, as if she could read his mind or taste the words he couldn’t say.

She lets him go.

And he goes.

Down out of the helicopter and into the sky, looking up at her, and even from this distance he can feel how scared she is. He’s waiting for the feeling of his skin shifting over his flesh, waiting for the snap and crackle of his bones breaking themselves into bits and growing back together bigger and stronger, waiting for the green haze to overtake his vision and to lose himself in the rage that chokes him from the inside. He’s waiting and waiting and waiting, and he sees her eyes get wide and her mouth shape a terrified ‘O’, and he knows the ground is coming up on his back.

And all he can think is, oh shit.

All he can think is, maybe I miscalculated.

* * *

Tony scours the tower like a man on a mission, flits around fast and silent, more like someone hunting a ghost than someone looking for their friend. It’s a game of hide and seek that Tony didn’t recall signing up for, because Bruce has been playing his whole life and somewhere along the line learned to camouflage. But Bruce has been invisible in the tower for coming up on three days now, and everyone’s looking and everyone’s worried and no one can find him. Somehow he’s managed to convert JARVIS to his side, and the AI won’t tell anyone his location, when asked only saying that he’s safe.

And Tony is supremely annoyed, but also really impressed because no one has been able to turn JARVIS against him like this before. So, that’s kind of cool.

It’s actually pretty fucking terrifying, but he’s not going to think about that right now.

The thing is, Bruce has been doing this sort of thing his whole life. If you asked him he’d say he’d been hiding since the accident, running since Hulk was born and the government put a price on his head. Tony knows that isn’t entirely the truth though, because he’s read Bruce’s file inside out at least a dozen times. He knows that Bruce perfected the art of hiding in plain sight as early as the age of four, knows that Bruce has been doing this very thing for a good forty years. Bruce has been hiding since before Clint and Natasha were even born. Tony doesn’t know if anyone on the team will ever be able to catch up.

He’s browsing through security footage on his tablet and trying not to chew right through his lower lip when JARVIS speaks up. “Sir?”

“If you’re just gonna tell me about how I’m never gonna catch Bruce without your help, I don’t wanna hear it, J.”

“Sir, Doctor Banner is in the shower of the common floor’s bathroom. He’s collapsed and won’t ask for assistance. He appears to be having an anxiety attack.”

Tony is in the elevator and on his way up before JARVIS has even finished updating him. And then he’s in the hallway at a dead run, zipping past Steve and Clint, nearly bowling over Thor. He bangs twice on the bathroom door before practically kicking it in, the others watching him silently.

Bruce is half in and half out of the shower, the glass door flung open, on his hands and knees on the floor. The water is still running, and the steam is so thick that for a second Tony can’t catch his breath. Bruce is gasping big, heaving, raspy gasps that sound rather painful. He’s got one hand clutching at his throat, fingers spread wide and obviously gripping too tight. He’s sucking gasps in but he isn’t ever exhaling, his eyes are wide open and panicked, toxic green streaking the brown.

And Tony is right there.

He’s also on his hands and knees, pulling Bruce all the way out of the shower, slamming the glass door with excessive force, pulling the towel that Bruce put aside for himself off the toilet seat and wrapping Bruce up tightly in it. He pries Bruce’s hand away from his throat and tries to keep his own breathing regular, tries to give Bruce a pattern to follow. “You’re okay,” he says, and it comes out almost like an order. “Breathe. You’re okay. I got you.”

Bruce is gasping and gasping and gasping, and there’s a high pitched whine coming in with each inhale and he’s shaking in Tony’s arms and then--

An exhale. Finally, an exhale. It’s shaky and painful, but it paves the way for more, and then Bruce is breathing more like a normal human being again. Gasp in, gust out. Gasp in, gust out. Tony has never been on this side of a panic attack before, and now he understands why Rhodey and Pepper sometimes look at him like he’s breaking.

They sit like that on the bathroom floor for a little while longer, both trying to breathe and not worry the other too badly, and then Bruce is using the counter to pull himself up. The towel slips down from where Tony tucked it against his skin, and he catches it more out of habit than out of desire to not be seen naked. His movements are precise and mechanical, his eyes are distant and very brown, and Tony knows he’s not even in the same place as Bruce anymore. Bruce left the room without his body, leaving the physical part of himself to catch up.

He watches as Bruce ghosts pasts Natasha and Steve, water dripping down the back of his neck and trailing down between his shoulder blades, his bare feet slapping against the hardwood of the floor, the towel vividly white against the tan of his legs. Bruce doesn’t say a word to anyone and no one says a word to him as he steps into the waiting elevator and once again disappears into the bowels of the tower.

* * *

He had been asleep and then suddenly he wasn’t. It was dark, but not as dark as it should have been. There was smoke in the room, and he was running before he even really comprehended what was happening. There was fire, both of the flame and of the gun variety, and he could only really make out the words Militia and Guerilla underneath all the screaming.

ratttttt. rattttttt. rattttttt.

There’s a little girl sitting on her bottom in the dirt, old enough to cry real tears that leave dirty streaks down her face but young enough to still be in diapers. Her arms are reaching out and up and her wails sound suspiciously like momma, but no one’s coming to pick her up. He knows he should run.

He grabs the girl anyway.

ratttttt. rattttttt. rattttttt.

He’s holding this girl to his chest and he’s hunching around her in some (mis)guided attempt to keep her safe and he’s running, running, running until suddenly he’s not. He’s on the ground and he can’t feel his legs, but he’s still hunched over the girl, still trying to keep her safe. She’s still crying, screaming panicked baby screeches, and he wants to scream too but he can’t.

ratttttt. rattttttt. rattttttt.

There’s a boot under his chin, tilting his head up and rolling him onto his back. He makes out the phrases white man and thinks he can fix us up and he sees the glint of the blade in the flash of flame and staccato bursts of gunfire as it slashes across his throat and through his windpipe.

And all he can think is, oh shit.

All he can think is, I’m not a real doctor.

* * *

Bruce has been drunk exactly once since moving into the tower with everyone else. In actuality, Bruce has been drunk exactly once in the past fifteen years, but no one needs to know that except him.

The mission had been bad enough that when they finally got home, Tony decided they should all get shitfaced. The mission had been bad enough that when Tony suggested it, Steve said it’d be worth a shot. Natasha had watched with carefully concealed surprise as Bruce tucked himself into a corner of the couch with a whole bottle of bourbon to himself and proceeded to drink it like water. He was wrapped up in a knitted blanket that was both ugly and itchy on the skin, and he didn’t speak to anyone until halfway through the bottle.

Thor had said, “My friends, as terrible as we all are feeling, we must keep in mind that we must also feel grateful. One of us could have been lost today, but instead we are all here. Is that not cause enough to celebrate?”

Natasha had been about to raise her glass in agreement when Bruce had snorted from under his blanket. Five pairs of eyes zeroed in on him. “Being dead’s not so bad,” he slurred, his eyes glassy and focused on a point no one else could see. “I’ve been dead lotsa times and it’s always been really. Quiet. Kinda nice, actually.”

Everyone stares at him. That’s a thing that happens a lot, everyone slack jawed and surprised, staring at Bruce with words dying on their tongues. Nobody moves, and Natasha glances around the room and notes that Tony may actually be holding his breath. Interesting. By the time her eyes make their way back to Bruce, he’s noticed that he’s the centre of attention.

He takes a long swig from the bottle, pulls the blanket closer around himself, and glares at them hard enough that Natasha thinks she can actually feel the heat of it. “What?” And she’s surprised again, because his words have never felt so much like bullets before.

* * *

Momma’s stopped crying and stopped wriggling around and stopped fighting back. Daddy’s sitting on her back, his hands still clenched in her hair, his breath still ragged, but he’s stopped smashing her face against the gravel of the driveway.

They’re the only people who live at this end of the road, and the next neighbour is a good five minutes in the car up the road and closer to town. He’s buckled into his car seat and and he’d stopped wriggling around the same time momma did. Now he’s sitting as still as can be and hoping that daddy’s forgotten him.

Daddy looks up.

There’s red on his face and red on his hands and he stands up as if there were strings attached to his shoulders and someone is pulling them. Daddy’s eyes are empty and it kind of looks like his body is moving without him, like he’s a puppet with a poorly painted face.

Daddy opens the car door and doesn’t even take him out of the car seat, just pulls the car seat out from the back seat of the car and hauls it into the house.

He leaves momma lying at the end of the driveway, quiet and covered in red.

Daddy says stop crying and he tries to but he’d lost track of the fact that he’d been crying in the first place. He bites his tongue and sits as still as can be.

Daddy says stop crying, and it’s louder than before. He presses little fists against his eyes and bites down hard on the inside of his cheek.

Daddy says stop crying, and he’s screaming and shouting it over and over, stop crying stop crying stop crying she never loved me and she never loved you because if she did she wouldn’t have left you with me shut up stop crying.

There are big hands around his neck, and his little fingers are scrabbling, trying to get them to stop squeezing, and he’s trying to show daddy that he can be good and he can be quiet and he can be a big boy who doesn’t cry but the hands are squeezing and everything is dark and suddenly he can’t hear daddy shouting anymore.

And he thinks, oh.

He thinks, this is nice.

* * *

Bruce wakes up screaming and slightly green around the edges of his eyes and fingertips from nightmares more often. More often than Steve finds himself passing his nights away in the gym, more often than Tony has to have Pepper drag him out of the lab and into bed, more often than Clint shoots arrows into the ceiling above his bed until his fingers bleed.

Sometimes the nightmares crawl up from the subconscious that he shares with the other guy, sometimes it’s all machine gunfire and screaming and the pain of a body that is evicting him to make room for something else. Sometimes he sees everything through tints of green, towering above everything else.

More often, the nightmares dissipate as soon as he wakes, proving to be more like the night terrors of childhood than nightmares adults work through in therapy. He tells himself that he’s okay, that he’s safe, that there’s nothing to be afraid of.

He laughs.

It’s the same every night. It’s not quite three in the morning, but he gets up and goes to the kitchen for some tea. Not the kitchen in his apartment because the shadows hover at the edge of his vision, waiting for him to drop his guard and become things much worse than shadows. He hops in the elevator and wanders into the kitchen on the communal floor. The light is always on over the stove and there is always the dim light coming in from the windows that are only ever opaque during team movie night. The shadows can’t live in this kitchen, so they don’t follow him down from his own.

Natasha is usually there, doing a crossword and sipping from a tall glass of milk. They don’t speak, just share the kitchen space and think their own thoughts. She watches him and he pretends not to notice, pretends it doesn’t make his skin crawl. After about an hour of this, most nights Natasha will head up to her own floor, no words passing between them.

Tonight is, apparently, not most nights.

“What do you dream about?”

Bruce pauses over his mug, his lips parted and waiting, his eyes thoughtful and exhausted. A beat passes before he shrugs. “I dream... Of the nothing. The quiet. I don’t know if I can say it in a way you’ll understand.”

“Those are the dreams that bring you down here? That doesn’t sound too bad.”

When Bruce smiles it’s soft and sad and almost wistful. It catches her off guard. He says, “It’s not,” and she watches him for only a moment more before turning and heading to the elevator.

* * *

He watches the lamplight flicker off the metal of the gun. He watches the shadows dance around the room. He watches the snow blow past his tiny window. He watches his fingers twitch.

The gun isn’t heavy in his hand like he’d imagined. Nothing about this scenario is anything like he’d imagined. His brain is still turning turning turning and the other guy is still pacing in the back, pushing at the cage he’s been forced into.

Neither of them are happy like this.

He watches his hands raise the gun up, watches as his hands turn it over and over until it’s pointing squarely in his face.

He thinks, this is insane.

He thinks, this sort of thing hurts people.

He laughs. Of course this sort of thing hurts people. This sort of thing kills people. He watches himself turn the gun in his hands again, watches the play of light off the metal.

He thinks, what are you even doing with yourself, Banner?

He thinks, and you, what are you doing with yourself?

The growl rumbles through his body, and he wonders if that counts as his own thought. He wonders if anything the other guy thinks is actually his own thought. Does he even want to know the answer? Even before everything his brain was always turning things over and over. He doesn’t have the energy to carry on the thought processes of two. But maybe there’s still only one in his head. Maybe the other guy isn’t another guy at all.

He doesn’t want to know.

He thinks, you can do this.

He thinks, go on, do it.

He raises the gun. Puts it in his mouth. His finger twitches.

He doesn’t have time to thi---


End file.
